every moment expecting him to turn up.
But he did not. The moon was up, full
and bright, and we spurred silently along,
each man silent with his own thoughts.
I noticed, however, that we all instinctively
began looking to the capping of our
revolvers, and of the Henry rifles slung across
our saddle-bows. We soon reached the
prairie we had left in the morning, and
suddenly we drew up with a start. There,
was his old white horse grazing about,
and, as we galloped down the slope not
one hundred yards from our camp, we
saw a sorry sight. There lay the body
of poor Sancho, dead, and pierced with
three flint-pointed arrows. We dismounted,
and, rifle in hand, gazed around, but no
sign of human being was to be seen, though
doubtless keen eyes were glaring at us
from some bush not far afield. The
avengers of blood had been tracking him day
after day, but had feared to attack him,
seeing him in the company of our rifles. Day
after day they had followed him, unseen by
us, but watching his every movement, and
knowing well that they would get him
separated from us at last.
* The famous New England governor spoke in bad
English, so that his Indian audience might understand
him the better !

I could never understand why they had
not taken the arrows out of his body, or why
he had not been scalped. Probably they had
been alarmed in their work, and had fled.
He was only an Indian, and among the
hard men who stood about his dead body,
there were few who valued the life of any
member of his race at more than a charge
of powder. Still we felt sorry as we
gathered some stones and brushwood to
heap over him. There was no mockery of
burial, or any more solemn proceeding than
pulling the arrows out of his body (I have
them over my chimney-piece now) and
riding on our way. Civilisation treads
fast on the heels of barbarism here. In
another two days we were dancing at a ball
in a frontier town, and next day were
"interviewed" by the editor of the Grizzly
Camp Picayune and Flag; whose only
comment on the story was, " And sarved the
critter right, sir!"

         PARISIAN FENCING.

A DISTINGUISHED member of the French
Academy asserts that fencing, like conversation,
is a national art with his countrymen.
To cross swords, he says, is to
converse; is it not parrying and thrusting,
attacking, above all, hitting, if one can?
And in this game the tongue is the
hard-pushing rival of the foil. In these days
duelling seems to be once more rising into
a fashion across the Channel ; only the
fashion has been transferred to a class very
different from that of which those gallants
were members, who were wont to cross
rapiers in the Bois de Vincennes and the
Luxembourg gardens several centuries ago.
Lord Lytton tells us that "the pen is mightier
than the sword;" and it is certain that in
the days of Richelieu duelling was for
cavaliers, and not for journalists. Now,
we observe that it is the knights of the pen
who are most prone to throw it up for the
sword. The French editor is sceptical of
the superiority of pen over sword, and it is,
in these days, quite as necessary that he
should be proficient in " the noble art of
self-defence," as in the proper use of verbs
and nouns, and in the science of hitting
hard on paper. Possibly the necessity of
sword-learning is the more pressing of the
two, for while a slip of the pen may be
remedied, a slip of the sword may not
unlikely be irremediable. It is certain that
the sword is, and always has been, the
favourite weapon of the French gentleman ;
there was an evident vanity in the wearing
of it in the old days, and the giving it up
as a personal ornament must be one of the
gravest indictments of the ancienne noblesse
against the revolution. So it is that
fencing-masters flourish, and become artists,
and are the companions of aristocrats, and
that fencing schools are institutions as
inseparable from Paris as incendiary
editorials and revengeful journalists. The
French are less bloodthirsty than their
trans-Pyreneean neighbours ; it is not a
sine quâ non to kill their adversary ; honour
is satisfied with somewhat less. So the
sword, which often avenges without bloodshed,
which punishes, preserving life, by
disarming, is a safe and proper weapon.
You have only to wander into any French
theatre to see how high is the estimation
in which the sword, as a weapon,
and fencing, as an art, are regarded. A
French dramatist asks what would become
of his profession without the sword duel ?
The pistol is only proper to the darkest and
blackest tragedies, but the sword is in
place everywhere. " A man wounded with
a pistol," he argues, " is no longer good for
anything. Wounded with a sword, he
reappears in a few minutes, hand in waistcoat,
trying to smile." And he concludes
that the theatre would be nothing without
these two indispensable auxiliaries — the
sword, and love !

There are few places which would afford
more amusement to the thinking foreigner,